


A REALLY nice dress

by RedChucks



Series: 'The Dress' - gender-queer Boosh boys series [2]
Category: The Mighty Boosh (TV)
Genre: Genderqueer Vince, Howard using they/them pronouns, M/M, Pining, Vince trying to sort out his gender, nonbinary Howard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-20
Updated: 2020-10-20
Packaged: 2021-03-09 02:56:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,988
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27117122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/RedChucks/pseuds/RedChucks
Summary: A sequel to "It is a nice dress".Vince really wants to help Howard through the process of coming out and finding out where they fit in the rainbow but he is having feelings and he isn't a big fan of those.
Series: 'The Dress' - gender-queer Boosh boys series [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1979338
Comments: 4
Kudos: 20





	A REALLY nice dress

Trying not to notice the way the frame of the bed scraped against his skin as he reached his arm beneath the mattress, Vince yanked the book from its hiding place. He could feel himself beginning to shake as he sat back up, teeth chattering and chest aching even though his skin was hot and prickling. He hated feeling this way, amped up like he’d eaten a jumbo bag of sherbet fizz, and so concentrated on steadying his breathing as he ran his fingers over the cover and spine of the book. His book. He’d told Callum about his book.

Coming clean made Vince feel like he was going to throw up, like a demonic granny was bearing down on him with hellfire in her eyes. He felt naked and bare - nipples exposed and all - and there were few things Vince hated more than being exposed and stripped of all accessories. But it was out now. He owned a book, and he was about to share it with Howard. It made him feel so jittery, like sequins come loose and spilling from an outfit in a shower of unstable light. He didn’t like it.

Howard was happy though, that was all that mattered. Vince just had to keep that at the front of his mind. His breath hitched as he looked down at the cheerful rainbow covered paperback, begging his hands to stop shaking. He didn’t even know why he was so nervous. Howard was happy and would appreciate the book, probably even more than Vince had. It was a book after all and Vince wasn’t a great reader, while Howard definitely was, so it stood to reason that Howard would like the book more. It stood to reason, Vince told himself, but instead of getting up off the floor and taking the book out to give to Howard, Vince found his hands gripping it even harder, his eyes blurring a little as he read and reread the title that he had long since learned by heart:  
“Finding your place in the rainbow - a teen’s guide to exploring your sexuality, the gender spectrum, and the LGBTQueer community.”

Clutching it to his chest, Vince tried to resist the urge to rock himself for comfort. Vince Noir did not cuddle books for comfort! But the urge was almost too strong and he settled for stroking the book’s worn spine instead, the way he’d seen Howard do when they were ‘digesting’ a particularly good book, as they put it. Howard loved books. They’d probably appreciate this one a lot more than Vince could, as difficult as he felt that currently was, given how much he loved the damned thing. But no matter how many times he repeated it in his head, he couldn’t convince himself to actually stand up and leave his room. 

Instead he reached up to run his fingers over the edge of his sequined duvet. He’d made it himself, out of double-sided sequined fabric - a rainbow on one side, silver on the other - and he still had plenty left. He’d thought about making himself a new mirrorball suit, something that would really dazzle, and act as a built in sensory stim toy as well. Now he thought it might look better on Howard. Hadn’t he just told Howard that tunic tops were all the rage? And Howard had looked good in the sequined dress Gregg had left behind. So good. 

Vince shivered at the memory of Howard’s big hands clutching the sequins in front of their chest, one smooth creamy shoulder exposed, like a smooth expanse of... cream. Vince shook himself. How dare he! Cream poetry was not on. No matter how good Howard had looked. Always looked. Looked more and more. To the point of serious distraction. Vince let his head fall forward against the mattress. He was in so deep. He’d been falling for years. Every time he thought he had reached the bottom of the love chasm, hitting it so hard the breath was punched from him, he’d end up on some new adventure with Howard and he’d look in to those tiny, chocolate button eyes, and just like that he’d be falling again. It was like the worst sort of roller coaster, and Vince was more of a carousel man. Constantly falling for Howard was tiring. Howard in a short, sparkly dress... Vince wasn’t sure that he could handle that. But he had to. He wanted to be a good, supportive friend.

The sequins of the bedspread rustled under Vince’s forehead as he shook his head, and he tried - and failed to suppress a whimper as he remembered the way Howard’s thighs rubbing together had caused the same sound. Howard in their utility trunks, in their jazzercise workout gear, in their Shakespeare tights - that was all bad enough. Howard in a sequined dress... it was too much and one glance down between his thighs told Vince that his old problem was back. He groaned. At least this time Howard wasn’t around to see it. 

The first time Vince had experienced a Howard related boner he’d only just started at the zoo; he was fifteen and green and Howard had kept putting their hand on Vince’s shoulder when they smiled at him. Howard’s hand, with those long clever fingers, that strong grip, that warmth - it had all been too much for his teenage hormones to deal with. And Howard... well, Howard had been kind and tried to talk to Vince about the birds and bees, reassuring him with red cheeks and darting eyes and stutters that it was nothing to be embarrassed about. It had been beyond embarrassing. Vince didn’t have the vocabulary for what it was.

He had tried to convince his body to behave - he’d begged it! - but it never did. And he never learnt his lesson either, because every time Howard did something increadibly ‘HOWARD’, Vince was always wearing the most inappropriate, impossible to hide a boner in, outfit imaginable. It was his curse. He was a slave to fashion and a slave to Howard’s hotness.

Gripping the dog-eared book more tightly helped to soften things up a bit (so to speak), but also made Vince feel so much worse. How could he be thinking about Howard in THAT way when his friend was struggling with their gender and the idea that they weren’t as cis as they had believed themself to be. Vince shouldn’t be thinking about how sexy Howard looked in a dress when Howard was having an existential crisis. He was supposed to be a good friend, a supportive friend, not a dirty, rotten, perv. But that’s how he felt. 

Vince scowled. He would make it up to Howard, no matter what. He held tight to his book as he pulled himself up to standing, begging his body to just behave itself for a change. No shaking, no jittering, no running his mouth off, no inappropriate boners, and no accidental flirting. Howard needed him to be on his best behaviour, to be their friend not their crush or their stupid, lifelong, fanboy. If that secret got out it would be just too embarrassing. Not because it was Howard but because Vince was supposed to be shallow - all bright colours and soft fabrics - he wasn’t meant to have the attention span for a crush that spanned more than a decade. Howard needed him to be their ditzy, supportive, best friend, and he would do it. He bit down on the book as he restrained the urge to make a frustrated, needy sound.

He wasn’t quite sure why, but he tip-toed down the hallway to Howard’s room, unsure of what to expect, not wanting to just barge in like he’d done earlier in the evening. He’d been without Howard for two whole weeks and he’d been a bit desperate to reconnect. He had boundary issues, it was no secret. And he’d just survived through two whole weeks of being forced to watch Howard through Naboo’s crystal ball without any way of talking to them, whilst Howard acted in that stupid fancy commercial and got fawned over by stupid Jurgen Haabermaaster. Those two weeks had been among the worst of Vince’s life. He’d been so desperate that he’d ended up talking to the blow-up crystal ball; it was like Milky Joe, Ruby, and Precious all over again and Vince had hated the idea of going back to that. Being stuck on that island had been the last time he’d felt quite so lonely, so far away from Howard. At least this time he’d actually been separated from them, and not stuck on an island with only six feet of separation between them. It had been cold comfort.

Right now, of course, Vince was desperate for comfort. He finally had his best friend back. His best friend had just come out as being queer and possibly non-binary and definitely not cis. His best friend who he had walked in on wearing a dress only an hour ago. And he was about to give Howard a gift they would actually appreciate (for possibly the first time ever). He should be happy. But he was about to give away his book, and he felt sad, which was well dumb. He wanted Howard to be happy and he’d worked hard to look genuinely happy in front of Howard earlier, even when he’d felt scared and a bit sad and didn’t know why. He hated when being happy was difficult, it made him feel like a liar and he wasn’t good at lying. 

The floorboards creaked underfoot as Vince shuffled on the spot. He looked down. His shoes were scuffed. He’d been wearing the same three pairs for two weeks because they were the only ones that really worked with his drainpipes and blazers - blazers which he’d been keen on a few weeks ago but which now seemed to itch uncomfortably, pulling at his shoulders and elbows and neck like they were choking him, suffocating him, squeezing him. It wasn’t a particularly new sensation, it happened often, feeling uncomfortable in his skin and his clothes. He wanted to believe it was more than just his shallow nature, more than the need to change his look; he wanted to change his presentation, to change the way the world saw him. Sometimes he wondered what it would be like to change his pronouns, the way Howard had decided to change theirs. He knew he was genderqueer, he was the confuser, he was bringing androgyny to the kids, he was half man, half woman, half unicorn! He just wished he was clever enough to really understand it within his own head. Like Howard seemed to have.

Words, that was the problem. Vince wasn’t good with words. Not like Howard.

Gender-queer. Gender-fluid. Bi-gender. Non-binary. Pan-gender. A-gender. Trans-gender. Man. Woman. Glitter bomb with a beak! Some days he felt like ticking all of the above. Other days nothing seemed to fit. And then, just when he thought he had a grip on what it was - what HE was - it would slip out of his grasp, like his hands were too small and stubby to hold on to his own identity. He wasn’t good with words. That was the problem. He just wasn’t clever enough with words. In any other situation he’d think about asking Howard but this wasn’t something they could help him with. Vince was supposed to be helping them, for Bowie’s sake! He was supposed to be supporting his friend through their own coming out process, not making it all about himself - which he always did. 

Vince hugged his aging, rainbow covered, book to his chest, rocking despite himself. It had been a library book once. Not that Vince would admit to having been to a library ever in his life. At least, not willingly. He’d been forced to attend the library in high school to meet the various tutors the school threw at him in an attempt to bring him up to at least a fifth grade level. They never understood him, never saw him. Howard had at least seen that Vince was dim and accepted it at face value. Everyone else had accused him of ‘not trying hard enough’. 

He’d thought he was in for it when, one rainy afternoon, one of the librarians had caught him in his favourite hiding place, squeezed against a wall and a bookcase overflowing with pre-k readers in the kids section. It was where he went before every session with the tutor, smuggling the rainbow book about gender in with him, trying to read as much as he could (as much as his brain could manage before the letters started dancing off the pages, doubling back on him, swapping their order and generally teasing him like always) before the humiliation began. He’d really thought the librarian was going to out him and tell him off. Instead she’d looked pleased ‘cos she’d solved the mystery of why that particular book always ended up in such an odd place. She hadn’t told him off. She was nice. She wore odd socks and kept a minimum of three biros lodged in the messy bun atop her head at all times and wore cardigans no matter what the weather was and Vince never once saw her wearing make-up. And she’d offered Vince help in finding other books that she thought he might actually like - books about animals and fashion and art - and when Vince decided he was done with school he’d come to let her know, and she’d given him THE book. To keep. It was fair to say that librarians had a special place in Vince’s heart, and that he would never ever admit to that fact.

But something which that librarian taught him was that when you saw someone in need of help, or a particular item, or advice, or friendship, then you gave what you could. In the past it’d been a cape, or a compliment, or a pair of gloves (that he definitely did NOT want back), or tips on styling dry and frizzy hair, or just a cheeky smile. Vince liked to give, even if he knew he came across as selfish most of the time. And he liked giving things to Howard especially. He liked being the reason Howard felt good about themself, the reason Howard smiled. His book would make Howard smile, and that was well worth it.

Knocking on Howard’s door felt weird but Vince wanted to get things right, and they hadn’t seen each other for two weeks, which felt like a decade in friendship terms, and an awful lot had gone down over the last year that he knew he was at least halfway responsible for. It was his turn to be the man of action, or gender-confused but genuinely trying human being of action. Maybe then they could both find their place in the rainbow, and wear matching rainbow sequined tunics. And if it was scary, well, they’d always protected one another from monsters in the olden days. It might be nice to go back to doing that.

At a murmur from the other side of the door Vince let himself in, inhaling sharply when Howard looked up from where they were digging through their wardrobe, wearing no more than a pair of tiny, bright orange, pants. The dress was spread out on the bed and Vince felt his fingers begin to itch, both to skim them over the sequins and to try it on for himself. The only thing that stopped him was turning around and seeing Howard had put on a very short, very pretty, black dressing gown. It skimmed his mid-thighs. It was almost a dress. Howard’s legs were long and slender, their ass plump, and their waist was ridiculously accentuated by the silk tie. They’d always had nice tits, Vince had always been a bit jealous, and the dressing gown gave them cleavage that anyone would be envious of. Howard looked stunning, and with their slightly out of control curls they again reminded Vince of Marilyn Monroe in the best possible way. His mouth actually started to water. 

Damn, he thought to himself, clutching the book tight, sliding it down from his chest, where it had been protecting his heart, to over his crotch where it would hopefully protect Howard’s virtue. This could get well awkward. 

“Hey,” he said breathily, feeling a blush begin to spread up from his collar to his cheeks. “You look well sexy in that, Howard. It’s genius.”

He tried to smile cheekily, ignoring the fact that alarms were going off in his head. His leg was jiggling and one hand had left it’s security duty at his groin to twirl his hair instead. Fidgeting, shaking, accidental flirting, embarrassing boner in stupidly tight jeans. He’d done it all, it was all over! Howard was going to... smile at him?

“Uh, thanks,” Howard mumbled, looking down as if his adorable smile was the embarrassing thing and not Vince’s every move and word. “I, uh, got it in Denmark. I wasn’t sure if it-”

“It looks amazing!” The words burst out before Vince could stop them, his voice turning husky as breathing took a backseat to drinking in Howard’s body with his eyes. “You look amazing! Really. That is a really... really nice... dress. You look...” His mind blanked. They’d finally found Howard’s look. He needed to say something. “Hey, I got you that book!”

The smile Howard gave him then did absolutely nothing to relieve the growing tightness in his jeans, or his blush, but in his heart, in his mind, Vince felt like he’d finally given Howard something they needed, like he’d done right by his best friend. It felt good, like sequins in sunlight, like the creamy skin of Howard’s shoulder against his cheek, like rainbows and reassurance. Or like wearing a... A. Really. Nice. Dress.


End file.
